Clouded Conversations
First Draft of a short story I wrote the other day:
The little boy was told that he could be anything he wanted to be when he grew up, so he told everyone that he wanted to be a cloud. He like the way they moved, the way they could form into any shape that they wanted to, and that they were high up in the air. If he were a cloud then he could look down on all of his family and friends and make sure they were always doing all right. If it got too hot he could sprinkle water on them to cool them down, or block out the sun if they needed shade.
Everyone laughed at him. They told him that he didnāt understand, that wasnāt what they meant when they said that he could be anything. He told them they were the ones that didnāt understand. He wanted to become a cloud and would stop at nothing until he became one.
So he hid himself in his room, all day for days on end. When people would look in on him they would see him sitting by the window with the window wide open and he would be listening to the wind blow through the trees. When they would ask what it was that he was doing he would tell them he was talking to the wind. He would sit there and listen to the wind blowing through the trees and whispering its secrets to him. He asked the wind about the clouds, the big puffy white ones, that it blew around all over the sky. How did the clouds get there and how could he become one? The wind told him that it didnāt know how he could become a cloud. All it knew was that it was the job of the wind to push the clouds around from one place to the next, to carry the rain from city to city. But the wind did know that the clouds held a lot of water that was pulled up from the lakes and the ponds. Maybe if the boy talked to the water he would find out how it got up into the sky.
Satisfied, the boy went down to the pond behind his house to try and find some more answers. The boy lay down on the bank so that he could just reach the water. He lay there and talked to it, asked it questions, gingerly pleaded for it to reveal its secrets about the clouds to him. At first the water was offended. It had thought the boy had come down and started taking to it simply because it had wanted to spend some time with water. Instead the boy was only looking for information. The boy apologized, but the wind had sent him over to talk to water. Wind had told the boy that there was water I the clouds, and it was the boys dream to one day become a cloud. Water thought about this a minute and then decided to help the boy out if it could. Unfortunately the water didnāt know anything about clouds accept when they passed over top of the pond or rained down. Some water left it from time to time, rose up into the clouds, but it had no control over that. All that it knew was the Sun was the one that pulled the water up into the sky. If the boy was looking for real answers then it should go talk to the Sun.
The boy thanked the water most graciously and then went to go talk to the Sun. The young boy went out and lay down in the grass on a hill, staring up at the Sun and feeling its rays of light shine down on him. He had to squint his eyes while looking up, a sacrifice he was willing to make, and he began talking to the sun. He asked it all the questions he could think of, namely he wondered how the sun called up water from the lakes and the ponds and the oceans into the clouds. And if the sun could do that, then could it also pick the boy up and bring him into the clouds? The Sun shone down on the boy and answered his question as best as it could. The water wasnāt brought up and stored in the clouds, it was the clouds. And the Sun couldnāt do anything about bringing the boy up into the clouds. Unfortunately.
The boy was dismayed. He had wanted to become a cloud so badly. And now he was being told that it wasnāt going to happen. The Sun told him that that wasnāt necessarily so. Sure he couldnāt evaporate like the water and become a cloud. But if the boy lay quietly and listened to the clouds themselves then maybe they would reveal their secrets to him.
So the boy closed his eyes. He felt the Sun shining down on him, he felt the cool spray of the water, and he felt the wind blow through his hair. All of them telling him to be patient and wait for the clouds.
And then the boy heard them, the clouds spoke to him. He lay there quietly as they told him their secrets. And slowly the boy felt himself become weightless and rise up into the sky.